How To Cook Like Your Grandmother
A Guide to Cooking with Real Food the Way Your Grandma Used to
I am the man. I try so hard to be modest, but I don't know how else to put it. The texture was perfect. The wife likes it. The kids, who have never liked tomato sauce, like it. And 11 out of 12 jars sealed correctly. Here's how I did it. … [Read more...]
Sometimes you set out to do one thing but end up doing something else just as good. I don't mean setting out to find a route to India, and you end up "discovering" a whole new continent, but I guess it's the same kind of thing: a happy accident. That's what this turned out to be -- a happy accident. I meant to make Focaccia, but it came out as a sort of flatbread. A really yummy flatbread. Of course now I need to figure out what I did wrong. … [Read more...]
Part of cooking from scratch is knowing just how "from scratch" it needs to be to feel good about what you're making. The other part is knowing where to buy the parts you're not going to make for yourself. This time it was getting a pizza crust from Alesci's and doing the sauce from scratch. … [Read more...]
(If you think you've seen this before, you're right. It's been updated with a couple more photos.) Making fresh pasta is like renovating the kitchen before selling your house: it always pays off. And like renovating the kitchen, it takes a little work to get to the payoff. The upside is that once you've learned the technique it's so easy to do you'll keep finding excuses to make it again. The simplest version is a basic egg pasta. This is what you'll get in Italian restaurants ... and the … [Read more...]
This week was going to be ravioli, but I had a lot of mozzarella left after last week's chili-cheese fries. I mentioned to my wife that I'd have to figure out something to put it in, and she suggested I do a lasagna. Now I had already done that once before. But I wasn't thrilled with how the top came out, because I neglected to cover it for the first half-hour. So this would be my chance to fix that. But as we were talking about it, my wife mentioned a white lasagna that she used to make … [Read more...]
